British authorities should develop a public-health plan to protect London’s prostitutes during the Olympics, B.C. researchers are urging after finding that stepped-up police action and other disruptions during the Vancouver Games kept sex workers away from their regular haunts, potentially exposing them to more violence and disease.

Such a plan might even include brothels that operate parallel to the sporting events this summer, says one author of a new study on the sex trade and the 2010 Olympics.

The survey of about 100 prostitutes before and after the Winter Games also suggested the influx of new sex workers and spike in human trafficking that many observers had predicted never actually materialized.

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In fact, the women surveyed by University of British Columbia researchers said there were fewer clients than usual, and they had a harder time connecting with them, perhaps because of the police action and other disruptions.

That meant many of the prostitutes could have been forced to less-visible pick-up spots away from colleagues and health services, said the paper just published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections. Not only would that make them more vulnerable to violence, but could increase the risk of HIV and other sexually-transmitted infection, since previous research suggests isolated sex workers are three times as likely to be coerced into unsafe sex, said Dr. Kate Shannon, lead author of the study.

“They don’t have support of other workers around, support of someone to call for help, so they have less protection to be able to safely negotiate condom use,” said Dr. Shannon. “Rather than this artificial focus on a massive sex-worker boom and trafficking, evidence suggests what actually happens is adverse effects for sex workers.”

Police in London, however, have already taken heat for doing the opposite to what the Canadian researchers suggest and actually cracking down on brothels near Games venues, a move critics there say will drive women underground.

The Vancouver research stemmed in part from media reports suggesting a prostitution explosion around the Olympics in early 2010, with the influx of outside visitors expected to expand the market for paid sex, and attract entrepreneurial sex workers from outside the city.

Researchers with Dr. Shannon’s group surveyed 107 prostitutes during the Games, and about 100 after the event was over, not necessarily the same women and transgendered people, but statistically similar.

They reported no particular increase in the pool of sex workers, the number of underage prostitutes or evidence of human trafficking, the study said.

The women did, however, tell the researchers they had been subject to increased “harassment” by police, which Dr. Shannon said included being detained without charge, fined or told to move along.

As well, road closures and construction associated with the Olympics helped keep the workers away from their regular cruising areas, the study found.

Making it easier for sex workers to ply their trade in safe indoor locations would be a more effective way to limit street prostitution during big international sporting events, said Dr. Shannon. The ideal would be to change the criminal law to allow brothels – as the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled last week – but Olympics organizers might also consider temporary facilities during the Games, she said.

Nevertheless, evidence suggests London police have been stepping up their raids in the boroughs where the Olympics are taking place. “The strategy will drive the trade underground,” making it more dangerous, an official with the British parole officers’ union told the Observer newspaper last year. A police spokesman replied, though, that “we do not believe that tackling vice drives prostitution underground.”

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